CD album art problem

[robotic]

I know there are a lot of album art threads already but I'm quite sure I'm only having problems with album art which was ripped directly off of a CD, all the music I've downloaded online has working album art whether it's embedded/in the folder. Most of my CD art is just folder images (not named folder.jpg just random letters and numbers generally, should I rename it?) Just wondering if anyone has any idea how to fix this, I'm using the latest firmware and have tried deleting everything and re-adding it, which didn't work

[DSperber]

Originally Posted by robotic

Most of my CD art is just folder images (not named folder.jpg just random letters and numbers generally, should I rename it?

Not to be disrespectful, but why would you think this is the right way to do it? How is the J3 supposed to know WHICH JPG (if you have more than one in a folder) is the one to be associated with a particular MP3 file when you play it??

Although theoretically other than JPG file formats are supported, let's just assume you're going to use JPG. I believe the J3 looks for album art in any of the following locations (in the following order of precedence):

(a) imbedded art, inside the ID3v2 tag of the file, or

(b) filename.jpg (where filename matches that of the MP3 file), thus allowing you to have a single non-album folder that contains tracks from multiple albums and 1-to-1 corresponding album art JPG's inside of that single folder that match the MP3 files by name, or

(c) cover.jpg, in the current folder that hosts the MP3 file, which is presumed to be the name of the single album from which each of the tracks in that single album folder comes (i.e. you should probably structure your music collection as \Music\Artist\Album, but at the very least you need an \Album folder with only one single cover.jpg file in it), so that the same single cover.jpg image gets used when any of the tracks in that folder get played, or

(d) folder.jpg, same as cover.jpg

[C3POwen]

Originally Posted by DSperber

(d) folder.jpg, same as cover.jpg

It may just be me, or the 2.22 firmware, but I've not been able to get folder.jpg to work, although cover.jpg works just fine for me.

[DSperber]

Originally Posted by C3POwen

It may just be me, or the 2.22 firmware, but I've not been able to get folder.jpg to work, although cover.jpg works just fine for me.

Could be I'm thinking of Winamp, which I believe supports either.

I, like you, stick with cover.jpg which seems to work perfectly. I don't use imbedded album art, nor do I have folders that contain tracks from multiple albums so that the album art JPG with a file name matching that of the corresponding MP3 approach would be needed.

\Music\Artist\Album with one cover.jpg in that folder for that album, along with the one or more MP3 tracks I created for that album from the CD (I don't buy MP3 files). Works fine.

[C3POwen]

Originally Posted by DSperber

Could be I'm thinking of Winamp, which I believe supports either.

I tend to listen to my music on my computer via foobar2000, which supports both folder.jpg and cover.jpg, but had been using folder.jpg for years before getting my J3. Of course, I then had to rename an awful lot of JPGs...

Originally Posted by DSperber

I, like you, stick with cover.jpg which seems to work perfectly. I don't use imbedded album art, nor do I have folders that contain tracks from multiple albums so that the album art JPG with a file name matching that of the corresponding MP3 approach would be needed.

\Music\Artist\Album with one cover.jpg in that folder for that album, along with the one or more MP3 tracks I created for that album from the CD (I don't buy MP3 files). Works fine.

I completely agree. That way, you save on storage space by not having multiple copies of the same artwork, which is the problem you get with embedding. I also use MP3tag to extract any embedded artwork from downloaded MP3s to the parent folder, thus cutting down on more wasted space yet again.

[lestatar]

Guys, cannot argue with you on the space-saving merits of cover/folder.jpg. Can't.

However, since coming to this joint regularly, I have noticed that there appear to be many more problems for some folks using this method. Mostly coming from an organizational perspective true, but occasionally other issues as well, or so it seems.

For me, as I do not manage my music library [or even my folder capable DAPS] by using the classic Artist/Album/subfolder protocol, embedding the artwork works best. Sure, I take a hit on my DAPs [and where my music lives] in terms of some wasted space, but I can live with it as it is minimal...Maybe a couple of HQ LAME albums worth of space? Irrelevant to me...

What do I get using embedded art religiously?
- 100% compatibility on every DAP I have ever owned, including some golden oldies that barely supported embedded AArt back in the day;
- set it and forget it mentality [like my ID3 tags, I never have to keep track of this stuff once its properly done].

Still, as always and with everything...whatever works best for folks

sorry for the tangent...

[Marvin the Martian]

Originally Posted by lestatar

*snip*
What do I get using embedded art religiously?
- 100% compatibility on every DAP I have ever owned, including some golden oldies that barely supported embedded AArt back in the day;
- set it and forget it mentality [like my ID3 tags, I never have to keep track of this stuff once its properly done].

Still, as always and with everything...whatever works best for folks

sorry for the tangent...

What about the hurdles you had to jump through with your rockboxed Fuze?

[lestatar]

rofl...OT, but since you asked...Nope.

Out of the box, all my DAPs which support embedded AArt worked perfectly.

Rockboxing my Fuze and Gigabeat simply required that I:
- launch the AlbumArt Extractor for Rockbox applet;
- set 4 simple settings
- run it and let it do its thing
- DONE.

Jumping through hoops? Not at all. No more than any new Rockbox user goes to install and try out various themes or to play around and find EQ settings they like.

So...Exactly how lazy are you? :P

[DSperber]

Originally Posted by lestatar

For me, as I do not manage my music library [or even my folder capable DAPS] by using the classic Artist/Album/subfolder protocol, embedding the artwork works best. Sure, I take a hit on my DAPs [and where my music lives] in terms of some wasted space, but I can live with it as it is minimal.

I understand completely. This is really the motivation, and prime justification, for using imbedded art. No argument.

For me, before acquiring my 64GB J3 which caused me to stop and consider the pros and cons of these alternatives, my PC music collection (exact duplicate of what's now living on the J3) had a separate CD Information Database using software that had its own separate album art JPG database folder.

The naming convention of these album art JPG's in the CD Database system was simply purely numeric, making them not usable directly on the J3. But since my music collection WAS already strictly \Artist\Album organized (with three self-invented "pseudo-artsts" to cover compilations and soundtracks), I already did have 1-to-1 album art JPG images.

This kind of just naturally forced me into the path of least resistance, least effort and maximum simplicity approach with the loading up the J3, namely just copying these album art images to the proper J3 \Artist\Album folder and then manually renaming each one to "cover.jpg".

A side benefit of this approach is that going forward I now also drop a duplicate of the same "cover.jpg" image file placed on the J3 into my primary PC hard drive D:\MP3\artist\album source folders used for playing music on my PC using Winamp, which also supports the "cover.jpg" notion for album art. So not only do I have album art displayed properly on my J3 when playing music, but the same album art also displays properly on my PC via Winamp.

One more side benefit of embarking on this approach is that it required me to make a complete pass through all 1007+ album folders I had, evaluating all of the album art JPG's I'd gathered (almost all from CD Now Amazon) over the past two years of this personal MP3-creating project. Several hundred were less than great, and this prompted me to re-make them myself (using my own scanner and CD album covers, producing high quality 500x500 JPG's) and upload them to the Amazon site as "user shared images" for others to retrieve in the future.

So I now am actually much happier with the quality of my final "cover.jpg" results, both for PC (Winamp) and J3. Since I use Beyond Compare to maintain and sync the contents of the J3 going forward (comparing it to the D:\MP3 primary collection on hard drive), if I should update a particular "cover.jpg" file on the PC it shows up with Beyond Compare as a file that needs to be re-copied to the J3. So maintenance of these "twin" collections is really trivial.

As you say... to each his own. Whatever works best for your own needs, that's what is right for you.

[robotic]

Well, I didn't mean I had many jpg images for different songs all in the one folder, all of the album art not showing up for me is in my cd files which are all in artist>album folders with just that specific album art in the folder with it with names like AlbumArt_{316BF3D9-9CEA-418A-AE26-2607680B4D3B}_Large.jpg - but when i was looking now i realised most the albums also have a folder.jpg in there too, which are not working

How do you tell if the image is embedded into the track? I think they are both embedded and folder images, but I can't really tell - I don't really know much about any of this so sorry if I don't make much sense

edit: I tested changing one of the folder.jpg to cover.jpg and that fixed it although i noticed i still have some embedded artwork not working (i'm pretty sure it's embedded as i can't see any images in the folder)

[C3POwen]

Download MP3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) and check to see what version of ID3v2 your files are using, as the J3 doesn't appear to recognize album art if you're using ID3v2.4. If that's the case, then just set MP3tag to write ID3v2 tags as ID3v2.3 (either UTF-16 or ISO-8859-1 - the J3 can read both), select all your files and hit the save button. This will convert any 2.4 tags into 2.3 tags. Now try and see if your embedded album art shows up on your J3.

Note: To save copying and pasting lots of files, you can just load up the files straight from the J3, although retagging is a lot slower, especially with embedded artwork.

[robotic]

"Download and add album covers to your files and make your library even more shiny."

haha, bonus
thank you

[DSperber]

Originally Posted by robotic

all of the album art not showing up for me is in my cd files which are all in artist>album folders with just that specific album art in the folder with it with names like AlbumArt_{316BF3D9-9CEA-418A-AE26-2607680B4D3B}_Large.jpg

Again... this will NOT work, and it's now clear why it's not working for you. This is just the wrong name for a JPG you intend to use for album art. This is NOT one of the previously cited acceptable name formats for a JPG that is to be picked up and used for album art by th eJ3 when a particular track is played.

As has been described, if you use MP3TAG you can look inside the ID3 tags and see if there's album art in the ID3v2 "APIC" frame. You can put art into the ID3 tag using MP3TAG, or you can remove art from the ID3 tag using MP3TAG.


Outside of imbedded album art in the ID3v2 tag, you can have either:

(a) a JPG-per-track method which supports more than one album art file in a single folder, to go along with corresponding MP3 files, and the J3 will display the specific filename.JPG as album art when the matching filename.MP3 file is played or

(b) a one-JPG-per-folder approach with that single JPG named "cover.jpg", with the assumption that it is for the single album corresponding to that folder and applies to the one or more tracks which are housed in that folder, and the J3 will display that single "cover.jpg" image when ANY of the tracks in that folder are played.

edit: I tested changing one of the folder.jpg to cover.jpg and that fixed it

Excellent.

although i noticed i still have some embedded artwork not working (i'm pretty sure it's embedded as i can't see any images in the folder)

Is it an embedded JPG or some other image file format? Where did you buy these from?

There must be some reason why these are not being grabbed by the J3 and used. Are they in a folder that also has a "cover.jpg" file in it? Maybe the J3 is getting distracted, and not looking for imbedded art under that condition (though this seems exactly the opposite of what I would expect to happen)?

[C3POwen]

Originally Posted by DSperber

Is it an embedded JPG or some other image file format? Where did you buy these from?

There must be some reason why these are not being grabbed by the J3 and used. Are they in a folder that also has a "cover.jpg" file in it? Maybe the J3 is getting distracted, and not looking for imbedded art under that condition (though this seems exactly the opposite of what I would expect to happen)?

Just to help clarify, the ID3 tags must be v2.3 and not v2.4, otherwise the J3 won't read the album art - at least not with FW 2.22 from my experience. It's worth checking with MP3tag to see if your MP3s are using the right version of ID3 tags.

[daliconcept10]

I Bought A Cowon J3 32GB and I cannot get album art from my computer (all small pictures 10.0 KB) How do I solve this ?
This is all new for me .
I have also a Samsung YP-P3 32 GB and to get album art on the player is very ezy .
So why made Cowon it so complicated ?
Please help me

[DSperber]

Assuming you have a folder structure on the J3 that looks something like \Music\Artist\Album\ with one folder per album, just put the single album art JPG into that folder and name it cover.jpg. That's it.

There are other more cumbersome methods also available (e.g. imbedding album art JPG's inside individual MP3 file ID3 tags, or having a 1-to-1 art-to-music arrangement with MP3 files named filename.MP3 and the corresponding art named filename.JPG, both of which methods allow multiple album art JPGs inside of a single folder but both of which involve more work and more file space used).

But if you have non-imbedded album art, 1 JPG per album folder, then just place that JPG in that album's folder on the J3 and name it cover.jpg. That's it. This is by far the simplest method available, and it works perfectly.

[Migdolas]

Hi,

This was exactly my problem too - thank you for explaining this!

M.


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Flyer printing has turned me into a fanatic.
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